“Duh! What do you think? About what you’ve made here, Stephen. About the—”
“I haven’t told him.” He steps in quickly. If she doesn’t say it, doesn’t use the word cure, he doesn’t have to unsay it.
“Great. I want to be there when you do. You know, I can’t quite believe it. I can’t believe it was this easy. My God, if John—if he had just lived a day longer …” She runs out of words, completes the thought with the smallest flexing of her hand.
Greaves shakes his head. He’s walking a tightrope over the abyss of an outright lie. “It will take more than a day,” he mumbles.
“You know what I mean,” Rina says. She touches the back of his hand again for a moment, her emotions overflowing in a way that scares him. “You succeeded where everyone else failed. I’m proud of you.”
It’s more than Greaves can bear. “No, Rina, no,” he says. It sounds as though he’s pleading. Perhaps he is. He pushes his clenched fist against his mouth to slow the words coming out, but he can’t stop them.
“What do you mean, no?”
He is helpless in the grip of his compulsion.
“I didn’t cure you,” he whispers. “And I won’t. I can’t.”
46
With the first hint of light, when the air is still chill enough to use the enhanced mode on the glasses, Sixsmith takes a reading and declares that they’re alone. McQueen doesn’t really believe that, but he keeps up the pretence as they pack away the sensors and the traps, expecting at every moment to be caught in a cloudburst of slingshot stones and baby-faced monsters.
The aim is to move out quick and quiet, to be on the road and up to speed before the feral kids know they’re gone. That timetable hits a slight snag when Foss does a head count and discovers that Dr. Akimwe is no longer on board. McQueen is not in the least surprised. If he has ever seen a dead man walking it was Akimwe, from the very moment he was told that Gary Phillips hadn’t made it.
None of the doctor’s possessions are missing, but he has opened up the gun locker (Phillips must have given him the code) and removed one of the handguns. “The doss fucker hasn’t taken any ammo though,” McQueen reports after a thorough check. “The magazine ought to have been full, but after that he’s on his own.”
Rosie’s electronic log indicates that the passenger-side cockpit door opened and closed again at 2.17 a.m. Sixsmith was still on watch in the turret, and saw and heard nothing.
There is yet another yack-athon in the crew quarters, and they all get into a pointless shouting match over the odds of finding Akimwe if they turn around. They just won’t, it’s as simple as that. Not unless he sticks to the road, and if he intended to do that there wouldn’t be much point in sneaking away like a ninja in the first place.
“He’s gone to bury Phillips,” Sixsmith says. “That’s where we’ll find him.”
“Yeah, but no,” McQueen observes. “He’s not going to get that far.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Sixsmith is on her feet, glaring at him. “Four KIAs aren’t enough for you? If we go slowly, we can pick him up with the infra-reds. He can’t have got far.”
But they would be driving back towards the children, and that’s a bridge too far for all of them. When the colonel gives the order to keep on going south, nobody raises a squeak. Not even Sixsmith. McQueen guesses that she’s just feeling bad because she let the doctor sneak out past her. Like it’s on her somehow that Akimwe decided to kill himself. If they did manage to catch up with him, McQueen thinks, the first thing he personally would do is smack Akimwe in the head with a rifle butt for stealing the handgun. The handgun is actually useful.
They get moving at last. The atmosphere on board is as tense as hell. It feels to McQueen as though they’re all counting odds. All except for him, anyway. What he is doing is brooding over an imaginary Venn diagram entitled “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Brigadier Fry has promised to give him back his commission if he will help her with a little problem, the problem in question being Colonel Isaac Carlisle.
There is absolutely no downside to dropping the colonel in a bathtub full of broken glass. But conspiracies, cabals, other people’s agendas, it all sticks in McQueen’s throat a little and makes him want to balk. He’d rather just go round and round with the colonel on a little patch of grass somewhere. Hand him a split lip, a few broken ribs, maybe the odd tooth. Shepherd him to a few conclusions about human dignity.
But that’s not going to happen. And if Beacon is going all to pieces, with the brigadier doing the carving, he will to need to find a place to stand. Might as well pick the one that comes with the fringe benefit of the colonel getting his ticket punched. They’re all as bad as each other, in his opinion, but the colonel is the only one McQueen ever had some respect for, and therefore the only one who has ever disappointed him. He has this coming.
He goes to Carlisle, in the cockpit, and asks for permission to speak in private—with a pointed sideways glance at Sixsmith in the driving seat. They go astern, all the way to the lab. Nobody is working there. The colonel closes the door and waits for McQueen to speak.
McQueen puts Fournier’s little radio down on the workbench. Carlisle stares at it, a slow frown descending over his face. “Whose?” he says. He knows what he’s looking at, and probably he has guessed right away what it means.
“Fournier’s. It’s a one-to-one. Permanently welded to a single freq. In case you’re wondering who’s on the other end, it’s Brigadier Fry.”
Carlisle nods, accepting the explanation without question. Because why not? It makes so much sense. “And how did you come by it?” he asks McQueen.
“Heard him talking, walked in on him. He spilled it all without me even asking. Fry wanted someone to keep an eye on us out here. Playing the political game, some such fuckery. I suppose she picked Fournier because she knew he’d roll over when he was told to. He wasn’t ever going to say no.”
Carlisle picks the radio up at last. “It’s still functional?”
McQueen nods. “I didn’t talk to Fry, but I could hear an adjutant repeating a call sign for a couple of minutes after I took it away from Fournier.” This is looking good. The old sod is buying the whole prospectus. It’s not as though he has a lot of choice, at this point. The radio is a big deal no matter how you look at it. A lifeline. They were lost, and now they’re found. Carlisle can’t do anything but take it and use it.
McQueen waits. The colonel says nothing.
“Might have bruised the doctor a little bit in passing,” McQueen offers. “I hope I’m not on a charge or anything. He really didn’t want to let go.”
Carlisle looks at him hard. Really searches his face. McQueen endures the scrutiny, deadpan to a fault.